The instructions arrived yesterday for the take-home final for Holocaust.
Typing those words feels absurd: "... take-home final for Holocaust." It gets worse.
I read through the options with my daughter - I'm not sure she's supposed to be discussing this with anyone, but it's a take-home exam due next week, so what do they expect, that she's going to keep it to herself? No chance of that, especially after the experience of her last assignment.
There's a certain appropriate cruelty in what my daughter is enduring with this Holocaust course, a course she took as an elective, out of sheer interest, which she thought would offer a respite from her more demanding psychology readings and exams. How wrong she was.
1. In the concentration camps a different moral code developed among the prisoners. Discuss what circumstances brought this about. If you found yourself in similar circumstances how do you imagine you would react?
2. Auschwitz and the death camps, more than the other methods the Nazis used to murder, have become a term synonymous with evil. Why do you think that is? Discuss.
You have 1000 words maximum, including footnotes. Refer to course texts and class discussions.
There were a few other questions, but my daughter is trying to decide between these two. She asks me which one I think she should tackle. She's freaking out, on the verge of tears. The task is daunting. She's already overwhelmed and hasn't even written a word yet. I get it - 1000 words maximum to explore the nature of evil.
The Auschwitz question, I advise. I'm thinking, at least she would be spared having to imagine herself being in a death camp. The Auschwitz question is more abstract and philosophical. Who hasn't thought of the problem of evil, one of the oldest arguments against the existence of a benevolent God.
My wife is listening. She pipes in. "It's because Auschwitz industrialized mass-murder." She nails it succinctly, as usual. It's my job to elaborate.
Auschwitz turned our sense of modernity on its head, I say. Until Auschwitz, when we thought of modernity, when we thought of science, industry and technology, we thought of progress, we thought of humanity always improving and moving forward. Auschwitz took all those elements that, up to that point in history we thought of as salutary and good, and used them to achieve efficient cold-blooded mass-murder. Until Auschwitz, when we thought of evil we thought of demonic possession, madness or a fit of rage. We identified and pinned it on uniquely monstrous individuals; Ghengis Khan, Pol Pot or Adolph Hitler. We thought of cruelty, barbarism and savagery. Auschwitz demonstrated the opposite: that evil was far from unique. Evil could be carefully planned and executed within a framework that was made to appear 'civilized'. Evil was a banal community project, justified in the heads of ordinary folks just doing their part. It was as regular and daily as train schedules and 'selections' on the ramp, like grocery shopping, to the right you went to 'work', to the left you went to the 'showers'. Evil was as familiar as medical doctors, those paragons of trust and care in society, doing diabolical experiments on human beings, supposedly to gain knowledge and advance science.
I'm not sure how my 20 year old daughter is supposed to 'tackle' the Auschwitz question, let alone grasp, in any meaningful way, that the stuff she's been reading about, actually happened. And isn't that the paradox of Auschwitz? It knocked 'evil' from its pedestal, and made it almost too familar to believe.
Beginning last summer, I've been reading a wonderful weekly series of short essays by Emil Sher in his role as the Jewish Public Library's Writer In Residence. Each essay takes the form of a letter Sher is writing to his two daughters, inspired by the teachings of the great rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. This week he is responding to the quote, "Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation?" I am reminded that evil is as ordinary as the weather, and accumulates like winter snowfall. All that matters is deciding when it's time to get out the shovel.
700 words, and the surface has barely been scratched (shovelled). They are calling for 7cms this Sunday.
Hugely powerful. Those of us who have parents and grands/great-grands who were murdered - NOT exterminated, NOT simply killed, NOT simply “died” in the Holocaust - often imagine ourselves in the midst of the Holocaust: what would I have done? Would I have survived? How far would I go to survive? It is something in our DNA, in the stories we have heard, in how lucky our parents considered themselves to have survived and thrived. To put that question to 20-year-old students, to have them crunch evil into 1,000 words, is to place trauma squarely on the same students. No wonder your daughter was in tears.The ordinariness of evil, and how ordinary citizens participated in it or turned a blind eye to it, is to say something about the human character. Blinding themselves to the Holocaust allowed the Rwandan massacres to occur, live, on television. Do we not learn?
ReplyDeleteIf your daughter was "freaking out, on the verge of tears" and "overwhelmed" then maybe the course was actually a good course! Your observation that
ReplyDelete"there's a certain appropriate cruelty in what my daughter is enduring" is on mark when it comes to anything related to the Holocaust, whether it be a course, or a film, or a museum. It's not a topic that one approaches to "get respite" ... just the opposite, obviously, as you have said. But I love that you -- with your high aptitude for empathy and your strong parental love and concern -- are struggling to help her in her struggle. (It's a recurring theme in your writing!) I can certainly relate ... I can't count the times I helped my kids write their essays during their school days ... and more often than not wound up writing the essays for them! (Which is kind of what you did here!)
Regarding Heschel, now there was a great exemplar of humanity! What does it take, I ask you, for a society to produce more Heschels, and less ... umm ... less Trumps? How can we increase sensitivity and decrease insensitivity? As far as my brain can reach, the only answer I can come up with is: more poetry! More poetry!
If I have to be honest, my daughter's emotional reaction was based in frustration with the TA. She loved the material, found it really interesting, but the way it was being taught and graded, convinced her that taking another course like it would be too risky for her academic record. So she's decided to avoid it, which is unfortunate. A failure of the system in my view. And that's really what worries me. The newspeak of academia is shutting people out. The message seems, either conform to the dogma, or be cast out. I can't argue with more poetry. As the great Irving Layton wrote, “Whatever else poetry is freedom.” But this mind virus, so prevalent in academia, is also infecting poetry. I never thought poetry and academia mixed. In fact, it killed it. I'm sure you've noticed in the journals and online, how much of the poetry being proliferated, in unprecedented amounts, is written with the politics of identity as its agenda. I'm all for increasing sensitivity, but not to the point of oversensitivity and offese. What I love about Layton's poetry is the muscularity of it. Where are the warrior-poets?
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